


Webs And Snowflakes

by padfootagain



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Wintery fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 18:06:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20262283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/padfootagain/pseuds/padfootagain
Summary: Your friendship with Peter becomes a little more under the snow…





	Webs And Snowflakes

It wasn’t so much because you now knew he was Spider-man. It wasn’t so much because you knew he never had an internship at Stark Industries, but was actually teaming up with Iron Man. It wasn’t because you had actually met Iron Man by now, along with his wife and daughter. It wasn’t because you and Peter had been brought back from the dusted dead. No, the shift in your friendship had nothing to do with all that. It had to do with the incident.  
The incident. Three days before. It was night, in the little cottage Stark had let you and Peter borrow for the holidays. Ned should have joined you, but he had tripped over some Lego while you completed your Millenium Falcon, and had earned a sprained ankle. The trip to the snowy mountains was thus out of order for him. Tony and his family were to arrive a week after you, and would spend one week with you. You were expecting the moment when Peter would call Tony ‘dad’, to be fully honest.  
That’s how you had found yourself alone with Peter in the Stark cottage, in the mountains, surrounded with snow.  
Now… the incident… three days before, it was night, you were hungry in the middle of the night and went venturing to find some snack in your pyjamas.  
Only, Peter was looking for a snack too. He had opened the fridge and was looking inside. And in the pale light of the refrigerator, you could see that Peter was not wearing pyjamas. He was only in his underwear.  
Obviously, it didn’t reveal more than you seeing him in a swimsuit at the pool would have revealed. But the matter of the fact was that you were not in a pool. Or on a beach. And it was not a swimsuit. It was his underwear. Black boxer-shirts. And the rest of his body was all bare skin.  
And that was enough to give you a heart-attack.  
Because he was handsome, his back turned to the dark but face and torso and thighs in the white light. He was narrowing his eyes a little as he scanned the interior of the fridge. He hadn’t heard you yet. But you knew his Spider tingle would soon detect your presence. You were only in the doorway after all, six meters away from him, and it was late at night, and knowing him you knew he was hesitating between the last piece of chocolate cake and some ice cream.  
You noticed the frown forming on his face and the way his bicep tensed, and you knew he would soon see you. You could still try and make a run for it. But before you could run away, he had turned dark brown eyes towards you, his lips parting a little in surprise to see you standing there.  
And the rest of the moment was just awkward and you still, to this day, wanted to bang your head against whatever surface was close to you rather than relive the memory. When he had asked you what you were doing up, all you could answer was that you had heard something and thought there might be an alien invasion or something just as dangerous and wanted to check if you would be dusted again or not.  
To which he had answered with a confused chuckle.   
You were pathetic.  
You hit repeatedly your forehead against the table before you to wash the memory away.  
Why did you have to always be so socially awkward? Why? WHY?  
“Hey, Y/N! Are you alright?”  
You jolted upright on your chair, looking up at Peter with wide eyes. You hurried to find back some composure though – or so you thought.  
“Hey! Peter! Yeah… I’m fine! Totally fine! You? You’re fine? All rolling?”  
All rolling?! What was that even supposed to mean?  
“Errr… yeah. I’m great.”  
He blushed, rather fiercely, and you thought it was simply because, once again, you hadn’t failed at being ridiculous. Actually, he was just thinking about the incident again.  
He couldn’t manage to see you as a mere friend since the incident.  
It had happened before you left for the cottage. You, Ned and Peter were finishing up your homework to be sure that your holidays could be focused on skiing and nothing else. And that’s when he had seen it.  
You were laughing like mad at one of Ned’s nerdy jokes, and twisting on your chair in that adorable way you had to laugh with your entire frame, and then he saw it. Your t-shirt going up a few inches, enough for him get a glimpse at your waist.  
And hell, these few inches of skin had been haunting him ever since. As if his crush on you had not been strong enough before, after that day, it was simply uncontrollable. There was no denying anymore.  
And now he was at a loss for words when he had spent fifteen minutes in his bedroom repeating this conversation with himself.  
He forced his brain to focus on the task at hand again.  
“Hmm…” he cleared his throat before continuing. “What would you think about getting out a little? There’s a nice slope nearby I saw yesterday. And we have sleighs. So…”  
He forced himself to shut up before he would babble too much. He was such a fool…  
“Oh! Yeah, that sounds fun! Let’s do it!” you answered with an excited grin, already getting on your feet.  
He gave you a bright smile as you both reached for your warm coats. Indeed, there were two sleighs outside, right on the porch. The cottage was a few hundred meters away from the little town lost in the American mountains, but it was enough to make it feel like it was lost in the deepest parts of a mysterious forest taken directly from a fairytale. You almost expected a wolf or a little girl in red to jump out of these bushes…  
There were spare trees all around you, as the cottage was set at the edge of a denser forest. A deep layer of white, pure snow covered both the ground and the leaves of the evergreen trees. Branches too wore hats of snow. Few birds were brave enough to sing in such a cold, it was a few celsius degrees under zero, after all.  
It was late morning, and the sun, although the cold air made the sky paler than usual, was shining without the bother of clouds hiding its light. Through the cold wind, your breath escaped in tiny puffs of smokes carried away as soon as they were created.  
You followed him through the trees, silence settling between the two of you. It was a little uncomfortable, as if none of you knew how to start the conversation. Which was insane, as the two of you had been friends for years.  
Your friendship had resisted years passing by, the end of the world, being dusted and brought back, him becoming a super-hero… and it was shaking because of a crush. How ridiculous was that?  
Your hands were wet in your gloves, and you kept your eyes fixed on your shoes. How could your friendship find its rhythm again? And… did you really want your relationship to be back as it was?  
You shook yourself out of your thoughts and focused on the real world again as Peter came to a stop before you.  
He proudly grinned as he pointed at the slope in front of him. Rather clear of trees and just steep enough to make sure you would have a laugh. It was a great spot, you had to admit it.  
“Race to the bottom, Parker?” you teased him, a playful smile on your lips that made his heart miss a beat.  
“Get ready to lose, Y/L/N.”  
“We’ll see about that!”  
You raced a few times - and you lost for most of the races, but didn’t really mind. You had pulled your sleigh up the slope again, laughing hard at Peter, when he made you a crazy offer.  
“Let’s go down together. We tie our sleighs together with some of my webs, and go down.”  
You blinked a few times as your brain processed his mad offer, your eyes travelling from Peter to the sleighs and then back to Peter.  
“This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” you answered with a wicked smile. “Let’s do it.”  
In just a moment, Peter had tied up the sleighs together. As you took place in your own seat, you couldn’t fail to notice how close you were to him, how your arms brushed, and the contact, even if only through several layers of clothes, made both your and Peter’s heart stammer. You both avoided eye contact. You both struggled to hide your messy breathing and blamed it on the sleighing and excitement. It was better to push it all away…  
“Ready?” Peter asked in a whisper that turned a little shaky.  
You merely nodded in response, and helped him pushing the sleighs over the edge…  
And you were sliding down in the snow, your trajectory distorted by the two weights tied together, and both you and Peter were soon shouting and laughing like mad. Cold wind hitting your cheeks made your skin burn.  
You had almost reached the end of the slope when you felt the situation get out of control.  
“Watch out!” Peter shouted in warning, but none of you were capable of taking back control of the sleighs… and you were soon falling over, face first in the deep snow.  
You rolled on a few meters, the soft snow preventing you from getting hurt. You had barely come to a stop when something rather heavy bumped into you.  
“Sorry,” Peter groaned, coming to a stop right against you.  
You were lying on your belly, face in the snow, while he lied on his back. You were the first to explode into laughter as you rolled to your side, and Peter’s laugh soon joined yours.  
For as long as you kept on laughing, none of you noticed how close to each other you laid, how your breath mingled into one between you, how your finger almost brushed… But then the laughter waned, carried away by the wind, it seemed, and you were left with only silence again. And silence was far from good enough to distract any of you from the nearness of the other.  
You caught him glimpsing at your lips, and he started as he realized his movement, staring back into your eyes with a panicked expression painted all over his features, his mouth dropping a little in shock. He waited for you to move. His heart was beating faster than ever, and he was so terrified that adrenaline had frozen his muscles. Which was unusual for him. He had fought monsters and aliens and was more terrified by you than any of them. Or well, he reckoned it was simply not the same kind of fear.  
He was so afraid of your reaction. What if you slapped him? What if you never wanted to speak to him again?  
Or perhaps you wouldn’t have noticed. It lasted only a few seconds after all, perhaps you hadn’t payed attention to his look at your mouth, and perhaps all would be fine…  
Yes, yes, all would be fine.  
Meanwhile, your brain was working at full speed, so fast indeed that you wondered how you could keep up with your own thoughts.  
You wanted to yield to an amazingly crazy impulse…  
… would you?  
You weighed the pros and the cons for a couple of seconds, but then, you were the one glimpsing at his lips, and any rational thought was thrown to the wind.  
Instead, you decided to listen to that spontaneous shout that screamed so loud through your soul at this moment, that every other sound in the world was shushed, falling in a motionless quiet only your own movement could break.  
And so you moved. You moved fast enough to flee from the fear of rejection that was lurking on the edge of your mind. You effortlessly distanced all thoughts of consequences, and instead, leaned forward until your lips met his.  
It was barely more than a peck, really. It lasted but a second or two, but it was enough to make your very soul tremble. You could forget about the legendary butterflies in the stomach, what you felt were more like explosions, fireworks spreading through your veins.  
As you pulled away, you stared at him with wide eyes, waiting for his reaction. The lack of contact and sudden cold hitting your lips again had the effect of an electroshock on you. Your brain was back at swirling with thoughts, and screaming in the void. Suddenly, all the consequences hit you at once, and it was unbearable. The most torturing part of it was that, besides waiting for Peter to react, there was nothing you could do.  
But Peter’s brain was on overload-mode at the moment, and it seemed that it had stopped working quite altogether. Waiting for a reboot of the thought system, he could merely stare right back at you with wide-eyes that matched yours.  
Finally, he moved his lips to open and close his mouth a couple of times. You reckoned that he was looking for the right words. After all, it was Peter. If he were to break your heart, he would try to do it delicately.  
Could one do that? Delicately break a heart?  
You couldn’t just wait for it anymore. You reckoned that if he were to push you away, then the sooner the better.  
“Peter, I…”  
But the rest of your sentence remained trapped in your mouth. Not because you couldn’t find the right words, but because he was pressing his lips against yours now…  
This time, it was a little more than a peck though, it was enough to make time stop, and your heart stumble in your chest in such a way you were certain it would either stop beating either explode. And when you broke apart again, none of you had fear in your eyes. There were no doubts left that the other felt exactly the same. Instead of frightened figures, you turned into smiling ones.  
It felt a little surreal, a little high, a little too heavenly. You didn’t mind the feeling though.  
You finally noticed the snowflakes falling on your cheek, cold against your flushed skin. You looked up to the grey sky, a laugh on your lips.  
“It’s snowing!”  
Peter let out an adorable giggle, raising a shaky hand to brush some of your hair out of your face.  
“You have snow all over your hair. It looks cute,” was the only answer he thought of.  
You shied away a little, but in a way that made his heart melt.  
You stayed there, lying in the snow for a rather long while. After all, why move away from heaven, huh?


End file.
